A Hard Disk Recorder (HDR) is known which comprises a television receiver and a hard disk for recording received television programmes. The HDR is arranged to be connected to the telephone network in order to receive through the telephone network television programme schedule information for display on a television screen. A telephone link must be established with the provider of the programme schedule data every time the programme schedule data is to be updated. Such updating may be performed at regular intervals, say once a day. The programme schedule data may be used by a user to program the HDR in order to record a desired television programme.
The requirement to establish a link with the HDR via a telephone network is undesirable. This is because the HDR may not always “on line” for reasons such as costs, or because the telephone connection is to be used otherwise. Accordingly, the available programme schedule data may be out of date. If a user relies on the programme schedule information when programming his HDR to record a desired programme, he may unknowingly rely on out-of-date programme schedule data, which in turn may result in the desired programme not being recorded.
Also, due to the ever increasing variety of television channels and programmes, it is getting more likely that there will be a clash in the programme schedule of television programmes which the user would wish to record. Currently known video cassette recorders (VCRs) and HDRs fail to address this problem.
An HDR is also known which allows the recording of a broadcast television programme, while simultaneously replaying the same television programme offset in time. This is useful, for example, when a viewer misses the start of his favourite programme by a few minutes but nevertheless does not wish to wait until the programme has been recorded completely before he can start playing back the recorded programme. However, in the case of live programmes such as live sport events, the knowledge that the “real” live event is running exerts a strong emotional pull. At present, the user has the choice of catching up with the live broadcast simply by switching to the live broadcast, thereby ignoring the missed period, or by watching the programme offset in time.
In addition, some parts of a recorded television programme may not be of interest to the viewer. For example, the viewer may not be interested in advertisements. Users of VCRs who not interested in advertisement breaks, for example during a movie, respond to this simply by fast-forwarding during the advertisements. Also, when watching a series of recorded video clips, the user may not be interested in some of the clips but can only jump forward to the next clip of interest by fast-forwarding the video tape. This clearly is inconvenient. To record parts of programmes in which the viewer is not interested, in any case, is a waste of hard disk storage capacity.
Advertisements broadcast during interruptions of a television programme are generally geared to appeal to the potential viewers of the television programme. Since this is not a very exact science, it may be that in certain environments the broadcast advertisements do not appeal to the viewers at all, or do at least not use the full potential of the advertisement breaks. The prior art has not addressed this problem.
Accordingly, it is desirable to at least address these and other problems of the prior art.